Report: Toshiba to Sell First Glasses-Free 3D TVs

Toshiba is aiming to put 3D glasses in a museum when it starts selling the first glasses-free 3D TVs in Japan this week. The company plans to make larger models of product available worldwide next year, the Wall Street Journal has said.

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Toshiba is aiming to put 3D glasses in a museum when it starts selling the first glasses-free 3D TVs in Japan this week. The company plans to make larger models of the product available worldwide next year, the Wall Street Journalreports.

Toshiba will start selling small sets sans glasses this week, with a 12-inch model debuting on Wednesday and a 20-inch edition offered starting Saturday.

Toshiba will disclose more details about these "autostereoscopic" sets at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, Masaaki Osumi, head of the company's TV operations, told the Journal. Osumi said a model with a display larger than 40 inches will go on sale globally in the next fiscal year, which starts in April.

The Toshiba exec said that his company is trying to gain a competitive edge over South Korean companies LG and Samsung, both of which offer 3D TVs. However, according the Journal, Toshiba's competitors have been skeptical about the technology that the Tokyo-based company is about to release.

Achieving 3D images without glasses isn't easy. If a viewer isn't watching the television from exactly the right angle, the display will be blurred. 3D glasses, on the other hand allow two different perspectives to combine to make an image appear as three-dimensional.

"The glasses-free 3D TVs Toshiba showed reminded us why we need the special glasses," Ichiro Michikoshi, an analyst with Japanese market research firm BCN, told the Journal. "Those TVs certainly set the direction for 3D's future, but it will take a while."

"Nobody thinks that we will be wearing glasses forever to watch 3D TV," he said. "It will have to become stress-free, without the hassle of putting on glasses every time. That's the way it should be."

Although they've gotten a lot of hype, 3D TVs haven't quite caught on with consumers. DisplaySearch this fall projected that 3.2 million 3D sets would ship in 2010, but that number would surge to more than 90 million in 2014. If DisplaySearch's numbers are right, that accounts for just 2 percent of all flat-panel TV shipments this year, which reflects pretty meager adoption.

Leslie Horn joined the PCMag team as a news reporter in the fall of 2010. She covers a wide range of topics from digital media to the latest Apple rumor. After graduating with a degree in Magazine Journalism from the University of Missouri, she wrote for Out & About, a travel guide in coastal Maine. One of her favorite reporting experiences was covering the 2008 Olympics from Beijing. She travels every chance she gets, and recently spent time backpacking along the coast of Brazil. Though she...
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